I decided to write my essay on Eugene O'Neill because he contributed so much to the field of theater. Eugene O'Neill's greatest plays were presented by the National Theater in 2003 to celebrate the fiftieth anniversary of the playwright's death. A remake of Aeschylus' "Oresteia" trilogy and the tragedies of Sophocles and Euripides' Electra, O'Neill's epic American tragedy of hatred, passion, jealousy and greed is set in New England after the civil war. Using Freud's theories, as O'Neill had done earlier in "Strange Interlude", he now sees classical drama (like Freud) as a rich field for exploring character motivation. Eugene did a lot for the theater; he was also the first American playwright to consider the stage as a literary medium and the first American playwright to receive the Nobel Prize for Literature. In 1922, O'Neill brought his drama Anna Christie to the Broadway stage; this story of a prostitute's return home earned the playwright his second Pulitzer Prize. O'Neill suffered a personal loss with the death of his brother the following year. By this time, the playwright had also lost both of his parents. But O'Neill's private struggles seemed to help him create larger dramatic works for the stage, including Desire Under the Elms (1924) and Strange Interlude (1928). Around this time, O'Neill left his second wife and quickly began a relationship with Carlotta Monterey, whom he married in 1929. O'Neill reimagined the mythical tragedy Oresteia in Mourning Becomes Electra (1931), trading ancient Greece for New England. in the 19th century. Five years later, he became the first American playwright to receive the Nobel Prize for Literature. He received this honor "for the power, honesty and deep emotion...... middle of paper ......his perception to reach the truths of human passion. So that the life is felt as noble, it must be considered tragic His final great play, Long Day's Journey into Night, finally tells the story of the O'Neill family as he had come to understand it on One Sorrowful Day in 1912. , Edmund Tyrone learns he has tuberculosis and his mother, Mary, falls back into her morphine addiction after the last effort at recovery; her husband and sons struggle with despair as she flees her loneliness; paved the way for a new era of drama and ensured that his plays were a great legacy to leave behind to inspire other playwrights to follow in his footsteps. His works were well known and a major influence on the playwrights of. today's company that deals with plays, television shows and films. His ideas were a way to change the cultural aspect of playwrights and socio-political reasoning..